Friday, October 29th, 2010

Results from NCPI’s POINT experiment were released on September 21, 2010, and find rewarding teachers with bonus pay, in the absence of any other support program, does not raise student test scores. The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study conducted in the Metropolitan Nashville School System from 2006-07 through 2008-09 school years. Middle school mathematics teachers voluntarily participated in a controlled experiment to assess the effect of financial rewards for teachers whose students showed unusually large gains on standardized tests. The experiment was intended to test the notion that rewarding teachers for improved scores would cause scores to rise.